Book Notes - Nicolas Hatzfeld

Winfried Ruigrok and Rob van Tulder

London, Routledge, 1995, 344 pages.

This book sets out to highlight the models used by big industrial firms to manage their restructuring and the types of solutions produced by these models. To do this the authors link up three major, formerly dissociated debates from recent years, focusing on the nature of industrial restructuring, globalisation and international trading.

On the one hand the authors introduce the notion of the industrial complex defining a negotiation environment composed of six actors: the core firm, the suppliers, the distributors, the employees, the share holders and the governments. The more cohesive a complex is, the more it is able to influence the institutions and the negotiation rules of the industrial system, which represents the macroeconomic level. The authors also develop the notion of the concept of control, which refers to the strategic perspective with which a core firm makes up its industrial complex. Its impact is not just limited to a company's national base; it also guides the company's international strategies and its choices with regard to international trading. Five concepts of control are identified: flexible specialisation, industrial democracy, macro-fordism, micro-fordism and toyotism.

Next the authors use a study of a hundred or so of the world's biggest companies to show how globalisation is more a strategic assertion than a reality for companies, and that the strategies for internationalisation are linked to the national nature of the negotiation environment that exists between actors. Two principal trajectories for internationalisation and alliance can be distinguished, which lead to concurrent world strategies, and to different visions of the organisation of the world economy: globalisation, whereby companies try to realise a world division of work, internally, and move in the direction of an opening up of exchange, and then glocalisation whereby companies aim at a division of work between geographically concentrated companies, within delimited trading ensembles.

The book also shows the link between internationalisation strategies and trading policy orientations using the same companies, and examines how they have progressed under particular trading systems. Only a few progressed under a free trade system. Trading systems themselves, originate in a national environment and represent an ensemble of specific interests.

Finally, the authors examine the relation between industrial complexes, centers of gravity of international restructuring. Analysed at a national level, the industrial complexes have an influence on the cohesion of national industrial systems, and on the national industrial or trading policies. At a regional level, the courses of restructuring depend particularly on the industrial complex and on the industrial system which has the greatest cohesion. Analysis of this logic helps to understand the nature of regional systems in Europe, East and South East Asia and North America.